There is a list of early North Carolina Tax Records online at NCDigital. These records cover the Colonial and Revolutionary timeframe and include 34 files from fifteen early counties. The description of the list reads as follows:
“"The Tax Lists and Records digital collection features tax records from the holdings of the State Archives of North Carolina drawn from General Assembly, Treasurer & Comptroller, and Secretary of State records. The bulk of the records are from the Colonial and Revolutionary War eras, but some lists date from as late as 1809. Each set of tax records includes slightly different information. References to “polls” below relate to poll taxes, a tax of a fixed amount levied on adult males, female heads of households, and enslaved people.”
The Tax List for 1815 Wake County is included and makes for a fascinating browse if you are researching the county in the early days. I confess to losing more than a couple afternoons to this list as I tried to find early denizens and get an idea of how the list is laid out.
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On the above extract from the 1815 Wake County report for Swift Creek district, you will see an Isaac Hunter and Theophilus Hunter paying their taxes as well as several Jones householders. Notice that Theophilus pays for several other properties as well.
The details from the list may include district, head of household, polls in household - white and black, land acreage, valuation polls, notes, horses, cattle, livestock, other luxury goods such as carriages and coaches. Each list is handled slightly differently.
There were 13 districts in Wake in 1815, including Buckhorn, Buffalow, City of Raleigh (COR), Crabtree, Cross Road, Forest, Lick Creek, Little River, Marks Creek, Middle Creek, St Mark, St Marie, Swift Creek. Some of these districts you will recognize as township names today. I expect the borders have shifted a bit in the intervening 110 years.
Others, like Cross Road you might be able to guess since there is a large shopping complex named Crossroads in Cary. St. Marie's has become St. Mary and approximates the area in and near Garner. Forest has become Wake Forest. Crabtree is certainly in midtown near 540 and Crabtree Creek area, the original location of the home of Nathaniel "Crabtree" Jones. Lick Creek is a portion of Wake County that is now in Durham County. Look at a present day map and you will see references to Lick Creek north of RDU Airport and Umstead Park and west of NC50. Buffalow is in the eastern part of the county and likely has a connection to Buffalo Creek that originally flowed east into Johnston County.
All of the entries will require some map work to place the householders in their appropriate locations relative to today. In addition to maps, consulting NCLandGrants could help identify landmark references, shared borders and neighbors to pin down ancestral locations.
Use this link to search for tax lists in other early NC counties, too. Thirty-four tax lists from the Secretary of State records list households subject to taxation in fifteen counties. The other counties include in Beaufort, Bertie, Bladen, Brunswick, Camden, Carteret, Caswell, Chowan, Craven, Currituck, Dobbs, Gates, Granville, Halifax, Hertford, Johnston, Jones, Martin, Montgomery, Nash, New Bern District, Northampton, Onslow, Orange, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Pitt, Richmond, Rutherford, Sampson, Surry, Tyrrell, Warren, and Wilkes. You can focus on a county of interest using the search tool.
I hope you enjoy your look at these early tax records and find an ancestor or two. Happy Hunting!
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